salon.com
Out of control
Why have conservative journalists lost it over the perfectly predictable
battle in Florida?
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By Eric Boehlert
Dec. 1, 2000 | For George Will, the syndicated columnist and former
Republican speechwriter, the cheese fell off the cracker on Nov. 11.
That's when the mass-market intellectual, who prides himself on
occupying a plane above the noisy fray, uncorked a column in the
Washington Post that rattled with a peculiar hostility.
The topic, of course, was the unfolding Florida recount of presidential
ballots. The average American, Republican or Democrat, may have
thought what was happening in Florida was a predictable, if highly
contentious, legal battle to decide one of the closest elections in
American history. But Will saw much more. He detected the remnants
of Monica Lewinsky's "stained blue dress." He saw Gore's "serial
mendacity." He spied a "corrupting hunger for power," a selfish
attempt to create "postelection chaos" and "delegitimize the election."
That was just the beginning. In weeks to come, as
the recount battle was played out in Florida's
courts, Will, coming across less as the
Montesquieu-quoting sage he fancies himself and
more a foaming GOP attack dog, spouted on about
"Gore's attempted coup," "slow motion larceny,"
"manufactured votes" and a "stolen" election.
The rest of the respectable conservative press
brayed just as loudly. Michael Kelly, whose
animus against President Clinton (forged in the
Lewinsky scandal) cost him his editor's job at the
New Republic, insisted in his Washington Post
column that Gore's "revolting" campaign was
littered with "hacks and political thugs."
At the Weekly Standard, a magazine that referred to the vice president
of the United States as "the jerk" during the campaign, editors could
barely contain their spleen. According to their current cover story,
Gore is "self-obsessed, conniving and dangerous." He's "certainly
divisive and ruthless, and wholly obsessed with achieving his ends," a
man "seen as compulsively mendacious. Politicians lie, but few do so
as audaciously and with such self-satisfaction as Gore."
The more rabid right-wingers, of course, were positively apoplectic
with rage. To Ann Coulter, who has made a career out of loudly hating
Clinton since the Lewinsky sex scandal first broke, the confused voters
in Florida were "stupid," "feeble-minded" "jackasses," while the Florida
Supreme Court represented "a kangaroo court."
Just what was Gore's unspeakable sin? What did he do that caused the
entire conservative press to lose its moorings at once? The winner of
the nation's popular vote, he aggressively, but lawfully, contested a
crucial state race so close -- the difference in Florida represents just .01
percent of the statewide vote -- that if the election were a 100-meter
dash at the Olympics, both Gore and Bush would have been declared
winners in a dead heat.
Even Bush supporters find it hard to argue with a straight face that the
Texas governor wouldn't have done pretty much the same thing if their
situations were reversed.
Of course, you expect partisans to be partisans. Republicans have
enough bottled-up impeachment frustration to power a locomotive, and
conservatives haven't been locked out of the White House for this
long since the Beatles invaded America. No one thought that the
vein-bulging right-wingers were suddenly going to call for national
patience with their horse in the lead, even if only by a ten-thousandth
of an inch.
Still, their all-out, no-holds-barred assault on Gore is so wildly
disproportionate to its putative cause as to be almost surreal. And
what's even more remarkable is that their lock-step rantings don't even
raise eyebrows anymore. It's as if the impeachment debacle created a
minimum standard for conservative bile, and now everyone simply
takes it for granted that the right-wing press will serve up bitter,
resentful, ad hominem attacks on the flimsiest of pretexts. For the more
thoughtful of conservative critics, this can scarcely be cause for
rejoicing.
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